Doomstar

6

They moved like ghosts. The darkness shrouded them. They kept to areas that had finished the day's business, where lights and people were few. By night, in the distinctive Darvan dress, Kettrick could pass for a native if the observer didn't come too close. And Chai's huge gray shadow towering beside him discouraged closeness. The semi-human Tchell were familiar enough, but their chief employment was as bodyguards, and no one cared very much to tangle with them.

Chai asked where they were going.

"To the house of a friend."

"Seri?"

"No. Not Seri."

"Why? Seri friend."

Kettrick said, "Yes…" He was over the shock now. He was light-headed with hunger and his untended injury, but he could think clearly and calmly. He was not at all sure that the explosion had been an attempt to kill him and the two Tchell. He did not want to believe it had been because he did not want to believe that his old friend and partner could so casually bend himself to murder. Also he had no evidence and no real motive to support the murder theory.

On the other hand, it was not a situation you took chances with.

"I told you I broke a law, Chai. If I go to Seri again, they will put him in a cage too."

He heard her sigh in the darkness. "I go with you, John-nee. Seri no good without Khitu." They had been hired as a pair, and Kettrick could imagine that she would not want to go back alone. It was Tchell custom anyway to change huts when one died.

Then she added, "No one to love but you."

He was deeply touched. "I'll take you home, Chai. Back to your world."

"No." She shook her round smooth head. "I go with you."

"All right," he said. "You go with me." And muttered in his own tongue, "I could do worse."

He was glad of her when they passed into the squalid alleys that fringed the Out-Quarter. He was in no shape to fight off even the casual riff-raff that slunk here, prowling for small change, a bottle, a pinch of narcotics. With Chai beside him he passed unmolested, into wider and better-lighted streets.

And now he deliberately sought the crowds. In the Out-Quarter of Ree Darva one Earthman more or less was nothing to stare at, unless he happened to meet someone who knew him. There were people here from every world in the Hyades and a dozen or two outside of it, human and non-human, of every shape, size, and color, sporting every kind of costume along with the conventional Darvan dress. These were people who lived more or less permanently on Tananaru, connected with one or another kind of business, legal or illegal, and preferring the polyglot anonymity of the Quarter to the Darvan city.

The mixture of building styles was as fantastic as the population. When they built, each group tended to build as far as it was practical in its own familiar fashion, and there were streets of towers, and domes, and truncated pyramids, circles, squares, pentagons, great ugly masses with no discernible shape to them at all, plastered or painted in every color the solar spectrum was capable of producing.

Kettrick had always loved the Quarter. He knew it like the back of his hand. He led Chai through the thronging streets, past shops and marketplaces where the lights never went out, past the joy streets where every sin known to forty breeds of man was available and the sunlight never came in, past theaters and gambling halls and certain obscure buildings where no one was admitted except those of one particular race and only the members of those races knew what went on in them. Kettrick had let his imagination play with these barred places, picturing all sorts of exotic goings-on, knowing that actually most of them were full of middle-aged people drinking their tribal intoxicant and listening to the tribal screechings of some bard, or else were engaged in the perfectly innocent and wildly uninteresting rituals of their particular faiths.

There were many eating places, all spilling their fruitful odors on the night. Chai stopped a couple of times. He knew she must be even more ravenous than he was, but he had no small money, and the last thing he wanted was trouble. He promised her food in just a little time, and she came willingly enough.

There was a section where the buildings were chiefly conical monstrosities with outside stairways giving access to innumerable openings — something between a Babylonian ziggurat and a dove cote. They were as murmurous as dove cotes, with voices and laughter and jarring snatches of music, some in the native mode and some in the popular jingle jangle that came over the home entertainment circuits. The native mode was, to Kettrick's ear, quite hideous, and he preferred the jingle jangle because it didn't force you to listen to it.

He found the particular building he was looking for and began to climb the steps, feeling very weak in the knees.

Now that he was here, he was assailed by a thought that he had resolutely suppressed. Suppose Boker were gone…moved away, deported, in jail, dead, or in a ship somewhere on the other side of the Cluster. What was he going to do then? Turn himself in to Sekma and give up?

The prospect made him feel physically sick. He kicked his way resolutely upward through an accumulation of trash, and small weird beasties that yipped and hissed and scuttled for doorways at the sight of Chai, and numbers of small blue-skinned children who howled and scuttled for doorways at the sight of Chai. Once he swayed and almost lost his footing, and Chai held him. He shut his jaw tight and went on, damning Boker for living up on the tenth level, as though damning him would ensure his presence there.

On the tenth level he found the low round doorway that had been Boker's. It was open to the warm night. He had barely enough strength left for the ritual knock, and then he bent and went in, with Chai behind him doubled down on all fours to get under the lintel.

Three blue-skinned kids with fuzzy white topknots stood up from a table, their eyes bugging and their hands arrested in the act of cramming their mouths with food. A buxom blue-skinned woman with a rill of white hair down her back dropped a wine cup into her lap and rose up with a cry, shaking her skirt and staring.

A blue-skinned man sat with his back to Kettrick. He had a magnificent silver mane, trimmed to run down the center of his skull and neck. He was naked except for a pair of grimy shorts, his body squat and immensely strong. Across the humped muscle of his left shoulder ran the white weal of a scar, and in the lobe of his left ear a flawed red stone gleamed like a drop of blood.

Kettrick said, "Boker!" like a lover greeting his adored one. Relief came over him in a wave. He felt Chai catch him and set him in a chair, and then there was a lot of talking and Boker was shoving a wine cup at him. He drank greedily. The kids had retired to the far corner of the room and were staring mostly at Chai. The woman was talking and no one was paying any attention to her. Boker was swearing very profanely, his teeth flashing, his silver mane shaking like a freetted stallion's.

"Where did you drop from, Johnny? Are they after you? What happened? What do you need? A hole to hide in, a couple of murders, or both?" He talked loud to cover his surprise, and poured more wine into Kettrick's mouth. His eyes were concerned. "You look like you tangled with a Cetian soldier."

"He's hurt," the woman said. "Let him breathe." She came over to Kettrick, keeping a ginger eye on the big gray Tchell crouched behind him. "Hello, Johnny." Her name was Pedah. "Can I get a doctor?"

"I'm an illegal alien. No doctor."

"Where is it, then?"

He pointed to his ribs. "But I'm starved. Give me something to eat first."

"You'll only heave it up again," she said matter-of-factly, and felt his side. He decided she was right.

"Feed Chai, anyway. We've both had a long swim, and a long day."

"What does she eat?" asked Boker.

Kettrick laughed. "I doubt if she'll be picky." In her own tongue, he said to Chai, "Feed, rest. We be safe."

"Good," she answered, and settled down against the wall. Boker brought her food and she ate. But she never once took her eyes from Kettrick while Pedah was binding up his side.

When that was done she let him eat. And Kettrick talked to Boker, in the lingua franca which Chai did not understand, telling him about his meeting with Seri and what had happened afterward.

"I wasn't sure, you see. I couldn't be. But I couldn't trust him, either."

"Wise man," said Boker. He and Kettrick had met out on one of the wilder worlds, in the days when Kettrick was still young and green. Boker had given him some excellent advice about poaching on posted preserves, and then they had helped each other out of a tight spot with an I–C patrol, and after that they had been friends. In later times Boker had skippered one of Kettrick's ships after he lost his own, and they had gone many voyages together, especially in the years immediately before Kettrick's exile.

"You were going to go this one with me," Kettrick said. "At least I hoped you were. Unless you've got timid too."

Boker laughed. "No, I'm still at it, Johnny. It's duller than when you were here, and the I–C boys have got smarter, but I can still run into a quiet harbor here and there and make a dishonest credit robbing the natives." He had drunk a lot of wine but he was not drunk, only excited. His eyes shone, small and black and bright in his broad-featured face. He got up and began to stride around the room, flexing his shoulders, slapping his bare flanks with his hands. "The White Sun, eh? A million credits, eh? Hell, man, you don't need Seri's Starbird. For that kind of money I'll take you in my jaws like a cub and fly you there myself!"

A small pulse of hope beat in Kettrick. "Have you got a ship?"

"A ship, Johnny?" The silver crest shook in the lamplight, the white teeth gleamed. "Depends on what you call a ship. If you call a dropsical-bellied, rust-eaten old excuse of a tin tub a ship, then I've got a ship. Mind you, I don't own all of this beautiful creature, only a third share. Glevan and Hurth own the other two, or better let's say we three own the mortgage on her. But she'll get to the ground. At least she always has."

Kettrick said, "Glevan and Hurth. They haven't reformed either?" Hurth was a blue Hlakran like Boker and had been his mate for as long as Kettrick had known them. Glevan was an engineer from Pittan, a small swart ugly man who had been chief with Boker in the later days. These were the men Kettrick had meant when he told Seri he would get his own crew. "Would they go along on this?"

"If they don't," said Boker, "I'll know it's time to shoot them. A million credits. Ah, and we came so close before!"

"You got into trouble before, too."

"Not the first time, Johnny. And probably not the last. Hey, now, it'd be worth doing for nothing, just to wipe Sekma's eye for him. Eh?"

"Better get hold of them and be sure," Kettrick said. He felt like a heel, not telling Boker the whole story. But Sekma had impressed upon him the danger of trusting anyone, even those he would ordinarily trust with his life, and so he salved his conscience with the thought that whatever he did about the Doomstar would not affect at all what he did about the White Sun.

He was perfectly determined to do what he said…complete the interrupted million credit deal he had started with the Krinn. He intended to do this right under Sekma's nose and get away with it.

It occurred to him, as it had occurred several times since the explosion, that it would make things a lot easier if Sekma thought he were dead, too. Then nobody would be looking for Johnny Kettrick.

Boker had been busy on the communicator, bawling in his own language, presumably to Hurth on the other end. He came back to Kettrick.

"He'll get Glevan. They'll be here in a few minutes. I only told him it was important."

"Good." He hesitated. "Boker, was there anything in the news about Seri's launch blowing up?"

"Don't remember anything. Pedah? She follows the newscasts, Johnny. Just like gossip."

"There wasn't a thing," said Pedah. "I'd have remembered that."

Kettrick hadn't supposed there would be. If it were murder, certainly not. If it were an accident…well, Seri wouldn't want to publicize the fact that Kettrick had been using his launch.

But it made a difficulty. Sekma knew that he was going to contact Seri, and was expecting to hear from him. If he did not hear from him, he would not necessarily think that something had happened to Kettrick. Much more likely, he would think that Kettrick was trying to doublecross him…which he was…and that would only make him angry and more inquisitive. Unless he knew that there had been an accident. But Kettrick could hardly be the one to tell him, and nobody else could, either.

Dying was harder than he thought.

Boker was frowning about something, rubbing his nose with his thumb. "Starbird, you said?" Kettrick nodded. Boker got up. "Something sticks in my mind about that ship. Back in a minute."

He went out. Pedah brought Kettrick more wine and asked how he was doing.

"Fine," he said. "Thanks to you." He looked up at her. "How do you feel about Boker going with me?"

"Let him go," she said, and laughed. "I got enough babies, for now. She patted the curve of her stomach where another one was just beginning to show. "You keep him out there for a while, eh?"

"I'll try."

"Just one thing, Johnny. You've been gone a long time, and where you were you wouldn't hear about it. Boker, he can handle the White Sun, and he can eat the little I–C boys for supper, I don't worry about that, but there's something else. Something the men don't like to talk about. I don't know if they really think it's silly, or if maybe they're scared. But don't you laugh, Johnny. And when you're out there, you watch and be careful."

A small cold stillness formed in the pit of Kettrick's stomach, down below the warmth of the food and wine.

"What shall I watch for, Pedah?"

"I don't know exactly," She stared at him, her eyes unfocused so that he knew she was looking not at him but at something in her own mind. "I hear it in the marketplace. And one of the Gurran women that runs a fish stall, we got to be pretty good friends, I buy so much fish…all these kids, and it's cheaper. She told me that in their meeting hall a man told them that trouble was coming soon. I hear it, Johnny. Men think women are all silly fools, but we have ears and tongues, and sometimes a little sense between them. I hear it. Trouble is what they say, and something called the Doomstar will bring it."

The cold stillness spread and moved down deeper into Kettrick's belly. The memory of his dream came back to him with the force of physical reality. "When do they say the trouble will come?"

"Soon. I don't know. Some say one thing, some another."

Kettrick remembered his own brilliant piece of deduction back in Vickers' library. The meeting of the League of Cluster Worlds, he had said, would be the time to show the power of the Doomstar. If there were one. And he had calculated six units of Universal Arbitrary Time until that meeting.

There were three and one quarter units left now. Not much. If there were a Doomstar.

He would have asked more questions of Pedah, but Boker came stooping in through the low door.

"Something damned strange," he said. "Tell me again, Johnny. What did Seri tell you about Starbird?"

"That I could have her. That she was unscheduled. That she'd be ready to go in three days."

"Three days, eh?" Boker grunted. "I went down to the Spaceman's Hall to check the day's posting again, just to make sure. Starbird had a full cargo, scheduled to Gurra, Thwayne, Kirnanoc…"

"Had?"

"When she took off," said Boker. "As of this morning."

"I'll be damned," said Kettrick. The icy coldness in him dissolved in a burst of heat. He began to shake. "I'll kill him," he whispered. "Accident, is it? Go to the island and I'll let you know, Johnny. Three days, Johnny." He gripped the edge of the table, tried to stop his shaking. "I'll kill him."

"You'll have to jump fast, then," Boker said. "After Starbird. Because he went with her."